Simple Prayers

by Michael Golding

Overview

In his debut novel, Golding makes sense of the current AIDS crisis as he envisions another time and place transformed by a fatal horror. Take a journey back six centuries to a secluded island in the Venice lagoon—a wondrous place where superstition reigns and life and death are created by magical equations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446517904
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	04/04/1994
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.88(d)

Editorial Reviews

Set on a small island off of Venice in the fourteenth century and sprinkled with magic realism, Golding's first novel concerns a plague which descends upon an idyllic community. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Already optioned for the silver screen by Warner Bros., to be directed by Alfonso Arau (of Like Water for Chocolate fame), this first novel by former actor Golding espouses the magical realism that made Laura Esquivel's novel a huge hit. The setting is a small island off the coast of 14th-century Venice, where a corpse with strange black welts washes ashore. The life of the island will never be the same. Golding has peopled his novel with endearing characters, like Albertino, the vegetable farmer who collects beautiful boxes, or Piarina, the physically abused child with a miraculous gift for healing. According to the publisher, Simple Prayers is Golding's attempt to understand the scourge of AIDS in a nonliteral way. The novel is infused with enough symbolism to keep a literature professor busy for months, but what makes it so effective is its people, who will wrap themselves around your heart and linger there for a long time. Highly recommended.-Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.

Library Journal